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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 2)

Posted on Tuesday, Aug 2nd

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 1998? Philippe d’Offay: You have to go back a little bit because the two questions overlap with one another. There’s a lot of news lately about medical errors. According to a Johns Hopkins, more than a quarter million patients die due to medical errors a year. In 1991, my grandfather

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 1)

Posted on Monday, Aug 1st

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Philippe has turned ~$300k of friends and family investment into a $6.5 million ARR business. Read on to learn how. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

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Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 7)

Posted on Sunday, Jul 31st

Sramana Mitra: As I’m listening to you, I’m thinking that last year, you did over $10 million with 50 customers. I can see that business model going to $40 million to $50 million in the next three years. You’ve told me that you’re switching business models, and your focus is going to be on the

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Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 6)

Posted on Saturday, Jul 30th

Sramana Mitra: It’s, effectively, becoming a competitor to Mechanical Turk and UpWork. Stephanie Leffler: Absolutely. UpWork also happens to be our partner. We’re fully integrated with UpWork and have an API integration. If you’re hiring freelancers there and you want to scale your project, people will often use OneSpace. UpWork provides people but they don’t provide

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Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 5)

Posted on Friday, Jul 29th

Sramana Mitra: How long have you sold the service? Stephanie Leffler: We started in January 2011 – about five years. Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit more about how this services business ramped up. Amazon was sending you people. You were managing their larger Mechanical Turk project using your platform. Did all leads come from

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Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 4)

Posted on Thursday, Jul 28th

Stephanie Leffler: I remember Amazon called us about a year into this project and said, “How are you pushing so much work through Mechanical Turk?” We said, “We built this software platform to manage it, so it’s really easy for us to push a lot of work out there.” They asked us to come out

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Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 3)

Posted on Wednesday, Jul 27th

Sramana Mitra: All this was organically built or did you raise any financing in this process? Stephanie Leffler: We didn’t raise any financing. We’re both very happy at this point that we didn’t. It wasn’t really by design but it was more because we didn’t even understand that those sort of things were available. Sramana

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Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 2)

Posted on Tuesday, Jul 26th

Sramana Mitra: You’re going way too fast for the story. Remember, we are doing an Entrepreneur Journeys story. Stephanie Leffler: The key portion of switching gears from trying to be a retail business to starting our e-commerce journey was out of complete necessity. We were in a situation where we didn’t have enough money to

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